Have you followed the big stories in football, cricket, cycling, tennis, motor sport, basketball, rugby and athletics?
Continue reading...The world No 1’s setback in Oslo and reduced participation coincides with the emergence of a new star
Magnus Carlsen, the world No 1, had his worst tournament result since 2015 last week when the 35-year-old ended up fourth of six in the $178,000 Norway Chess event at Oslo, losing four games out of 10.
There were reasons for his disappointing showing. Previous editions of the event were in distant Stavanger, far from the hometown pressures of Oslo, while Carlsen is the father of a baby son, and he arrived at several games seemingly unprepared.
Continue reading...Eight years on from being sacked by Spain on the eve of the World Cup, Julen Lopetegui will get his chance on the big stage as head coach of Qatar
When the Qatari national team’s flight from Dublin touched down in Los Angeles at 2.12pm on 30 May there was applause on board the Boeing 777‑300ER. For the 26 players arriving in America, this represents the first time they have qualified for a World Cup. For the coach who has led them there it is the third, but this time is different; this time he will get a game.
“Football didn’t owe me anything,” says Julen Lopetegui in the dining room at the team hotel in Montecito, Santa Barbara, yet maybe he owed himself a moment like this. And, he says, if there were many reasons to answer the call from Doha 12 months ago, the simplest stood out most of all: this is the World Cup.
Continue reading...This week’s best wildlife photographs from around the world
Continue reading...Former street seller celebrates newfound rights after debacle in claiming €500,000 scratchcard prize while undocumented
A Nigerian man who won €500,000 in an Italian lottery – but was barred from collecting his windfall because he was undocumented – said the hardship of his more than decade-long immigration journey had been eased after he was finally granted a residency permit.
“I’ve been praying for this moment ever since I arrived in Italy,” said Imagbe Ehizomwengie, 36. “It’s a huge relief. You might think it’s incredible, but receiving the permit means more to me than winning the money. I want to work and contribute to society.”
Continue reading...Rolling coverage of SpaceX’s record-breaking initial public offering
The SpaceX IPO also led to an unusual protest yesterday in New York.
A 40-foot high giant inflatable of Elon Musk, smiling and shirtless, appeared at Times Square. It was created by the Safe AI Now (SAIN) coalition, to warn of the dangers of SpaceX’s AI assistant Grok.
The enormous inflatable of Musk is meant to draw attention to a serious issue: SpaceX’s Grok has been widely used to generate illicit images of real people – including children. In fact, a NYT report found that of the 4.4 million images Grok pushed out in a recent nine-day period, an estimated 65% were sexualized or explicit. There are entire online communities, with hundreds of thousands of visitors each week, dedicated to sharing Grok-generated pornography and tips for explicit content generation.
While this inflatable is a fitting metaphor – much like Musk and his companies, it is inflated, full of hot air, and could pop at any minute – it serves as a warning to investors eager to buy into Musk’s SpaceX IPO on Friday morning. Because the reality is, shareholders’ investment in SpaceX means financially supporting a company that has been involved in child exploitation, revenge porn, and worse.
Continue reading...The show featuring a host of Latin American talent raced along and was over in a flash, leaving those at the Estadio Azteca wanting more
ITV’s Mark Pougatch could barely contain his excitement. “Let’s be honest, opening ceremonies aren’t very memorable,” he offered, clearly intent on whipping up viewers into a frenzy of anticipation before events in the Estadio Azteca got under way. A few minutes later, he was at it again. “Nothing is happening,” he shrugged, when the opening ceremony didn’t kick off bang on time. “This is why they don’t live long in the memory.”
No one was going to accuse him of overselling Mexico’s big night, but then perhaps he was underwhelmed by the lineup. With the global star power reserved for the final’s half-time show – which features Madonna, Coldplay and BTS – the Mexican ceremony stuck fast to relatively local talent. It kicked off with Maná, the most successful Latin American rock band of all time, who – to judge by the 1992 hit they performed, Oye Mi Amor – have sold 45m records by sounding not unlike The Police. They were pretty good, as was Venezuela’s Danny Ocean and the Mexican singer-songwriter Belinda, both of whom broke out one of the 18 (eighteen!) official World Cup songs: Ocean’s Partidazo was a nippy bit of reggaeton, Belinda’s Por Ella a sweet collaboration with veteran cumbia band Los Ángeles Azules, the latter a disconcerting sight for British viewers on account of the fact that their bass player looked as if he was being impersonated by Paul Whitehouse.
Continue reading...Beamish/Corbett/Whitehead/Havlat/ Irvine/Thomson/Ventris
(Delphian)
The British composer’s celebratory album is a family affair
Sally Beamish celebrates 70 years on planet Earth with an eclectic and profoundly personal album featuring friends and members of her talented musical family. At the centre of it all is Beamish herself, a musical shapeshifter, at home in classical, jazz or folk fiddle, performing on her own instrument, the viola.
It opens with April, a luminous chaconne for viola and accordion memorialising her friend, jazz pianist Ellis Marsalis Jr. Equally poignant is Gerropaedie for viola and harp, a Satie-inspired birthday gift for an elderly patron.
Continue reading...
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Bizarre beelden van de ravage in de hoofdstad, waar in Osdorp, Nieuw-West, aan het begin van de nacht zeker zeven gewonden zijn gevallen na een grote explosie bij een flatgebouw. Honderden mensen moesten het gebouw verlaten en stonden plots op kousenvoeten op straat, de brand is inmiddels geblust maar mogelijk liggen er nog mensen onder het puin. Onderaan het gebouw zit (of zat) Fitness Studio Onna, een 24/7 sportschool voor leden: "De gewonden zouden ook onder deze groep zijn gevallen. Volgens aanwezigen zou de explosie binnen zijn ontstaan en niet buiten." De eigenaar van de sportschool schrijft op Instagram: "Op de camerabeelden van binnen het pand is duidelijk te zien dat de explosie van onder onze vloer vandaan komt. Op de begane grond, onder onze sportschool, bevinden zich onder andere leiding, een transformatorruimte en opslagruimtes van bewoners. Deze ruimtes zijn geen onderdeel van onze sportschool." De precieze toedracht is nog onduidelijk. Later meer...
Drone en speurhonden aan het werk
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BERGEN (ANP) - De NAVO gaat haar troepenmacht in Kosovo afbouwen. Het is rustiger in het Balkanstaatje en de eigen veiligheidsdiensten zijn beter toegerust voor hun taken, zegt de hoogste commandant van de NAVO.
"De veiligheidssituatie in Kosovo is blijven verbeteren de laatste jaren", stelt de Amerikaanse NAVO-generaal Alexus Grynkewich, die de verdediging van Europa leidt. Daarom zal het bondgenootschap "zijn huidige sterkte in de loop van volgend jaar geleidelijk aanpassen". NAVO-diplomaten verwachtten al langer dat het aantal NAVO-militairen in Kosovo zou worden verminderd. Dat past volgens hen ook bij de nieuwe richting die de alliantie is ingeslagen. De eigen verdediging krijgt weer voorrang op ingrijpen in andere landen.
In 2023 stuurde de NAVO juist honderden extra militairen naar Kosovo na gewelddadige botsingen tussen de Servische minderheid en de Albanese meerderheid. Kosovo vocht zich in de jaren negentig vrij van Servië.
Nederland nam eerder deel aan KFOR, maar al een poos niet meer.
BRUSSEL (ANP) - Rabobank en ING hebben interesse in een belang in de Belgische staatsbank Belfius, meldt de Belgische krant De Tijd. Eind vorig jaar stemde de Belgische regering in met de verkoop van een belang van 20 procent van de bank, die sinds 2011 volledig in handen is van de overheid.
Het is de bedoeling om het minderheidsbelang in Belfius, het voormalige Dexia België, rechtstreeks te verkopen aan een of meerdere geïnteresseerde partijen. De verkoop kan de Belgische overheid meer dan 2 miljard euro opleveren, aldus De Tijd.
Tot nu toe kwam volgens de krant slechts de naam van één potentiële koper naar buiten, die van de Europese investeerder CVC, die een beursnotering heeft in Amsterdam. In afwachting van het officiële startschot van de verkoop, dat mogelijk binnen enkele weken wordt gegeven, doen volgens De Tijd nu ook andere namen de ronde, zoals Rabobank en ING. Ook de Franse bank Crédit Agricole wordt genoemd.
NICOSIA (ANP) - De Cypriotische minister van Migratie, Nicholas Ioannides, verwacht dat de EU "zeker een jaar nodig heeft" voordat het asiel- en migratiepact goed functioneert. Dat zei hij vrijdag bij aankomst in Nicosia, waar het officiële startschot wordt gegeven van het pact waarin strengere en uniforme regels staan voor de screening, beoordeling en verdeling van asielzoekers over de EU. Er is tien jaar over onderhandeld en de lidstaten hadden twee jaar de tijd om alles te implementeren.
Nog steeds zijn niet alle EU-lidstaten klaar met alle voorbereidingen. In een enkel land is bijvoorbeeld het wetgevingstraject nog niet afgerond.
"De inwerkingtreding van het pact vandaag is niet het einde; we beginnen pas", zei Ioannides. "We moeten hard werken om ervoor te zorgen dat het pact toekomstbestendig en functioneel is en een succes wordt. We zijn hier vandaag om te vieren, maar we zijn ons ervan bewust dat we hard moeten blijven werken om onze doelstellingen op migratie te verwezenlijken."
Thomas Hawk posted a photo:
ON CALL 你好 Nǐ hǎo, dear reader, and welcome to another installment of On Call, The Register's Friday column that shares your stories of translating technical trauma while delivering transcendent tech support. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Jackson" who told us about his time providing tech support in a university's biology department. "It was sometime in the mid-2000s and our IT group at the time consisted of myself, my boss, and a part-timer," he told On Call. "We were a very casual IT group; nothing in the way of any formal policies or standards for anything at all. If someone needed a new PC, we just ordered parts and assembled them ourselves." The department's PC fleet therefore had a diverse gene pool, with no two machines possessing the same bill of materials. "This was fine by me – I enjoyed building them and it never really caused any issues that I couldn't handle," Jackson told On Call. "Until one day we got a panicked support call from one of the secretaries who claimed that her PC just rebooted and then started talking to her." Jackson and his colleagues didn't believe a word of it until the secretary stopped talking and placed her phone next to the talking PC. "I could clearly hear a muffled voice repeating a message of some sort," Jackson told On Call. There was nothing for it but to visit the PC, which he found hung in the middle of a Power-On Self-Test, flashing an alphanumeric error code and unmistakably playing a voice through its internal speaker. In Chinese! Jackson rebooted the machine and it ended up in the same state, reciting the same message. Chinese isn't a language in which Jackson is fluent, so he had no idea what the PC was trying to tell him. "After poking around in the BIOS, I found the culprit," Jackson revealed. "This particular model of motherboard had a 'talking error BIOS' whereby certain POST codes triggered the playback of a friendly, spoken error message, with Chinese set as the default language." Jackson found the relevant BIOS settings, changed the default language to English, and the next time he rebooted the machine it helpfully let him know: "Your floppy drive may not be connected properly." In his mail to On Call, Jackson hypothesized that the PC's CMOS battery died, so the BIOS was unable to access its stored settings and reverted to factory settings that assumed the presence of a nonexistent second floppy drive. "It triggered a feature I didn't even know the motherboard had!" Jackson told On Call. Have you found yourself flummoxed by a feature you didn't know about? If so, click here to send On Call an email – we'll assume that's a feature you know well – so we can tell your story on a future Friday. ®
Feyenoord-middenvelder Hwang In-beom heeft in de WK-openingswedstrijd van zijn land Zuid-Korea tegen Tsjechië een belangrijke rol gespeeld. Met een doelpunt en een assist hielp hij Zuid-Korea aan een 2-1 overwinning. Hwang werd door de FIFA uitgeroepen tot man van de wedstrijd.
Een hond is overleden nadat de hond en zijn eigenaresse eind mei in de Planetenbuurt in Oude-Tonge werden aangevallen door twee bulldogs. De vrouw raakte daarbij gewond. De honden zijn meegenomen door de politie, hun gedrag wordt nu onderzocht.
